To develop a common deflection and twist measuring method applicable for both ground and flight tests, the left wing of a Global 7500 business jet was instrumented with fiber Bragg gratings and ...underwent durability and damage tolerance certification testing. This fiber optical sensing system allows distributed strain measurements on the wing. Fatigue and static tests were monitored. It was shown that the front and rear spar deflections could be analytically calculated with an acceptable accuracy. However, the twist could not be successfully calculated. A neural network was then used to address this issue. Even though the deflection predictions were less accurate than those analytically calculated, the wing twist was successfully predicted. This study shows the potential of using fiber Bragg grating as a shared ground and flight tests strain measuring method allowing to calculate the aircraft wing deflection and to determine the wing twist angle using a neural network.
•Fiber Bragg gratings installed on the wing of a business jet Global 7500 submitted to durability and damage tolerance certification testing.•Wing deflection calculated during durability and damage tolerance testing.•A new method to determine the wing twist angle using a neural network.
OBJECTIVE
The choice of cardioplegic solution for myocardial preservation in heart transplantation (HT) remains debated. We analysed our experience with three different cardioplegic solutions in ...adult HT performed during past 5 years, in terms of non-immunological intraoperative biventricular graft failure (BVF) and in-hospital mortality.
METHODS
A total of 133 patients underwent HT at our hospital from January 2006 to December 2010. Patients were divided into three groups, according to the solution adopted in the donor: HTK-Custodiol (n = 61), Celsior (n = 38) and St Thomas (n = 34). For each patient, solution was chosen according to surgeon's preference.
RESULTS
Recipient and donor mean age was 48.2 ± 12.7 and 43.8 ± 13.6 years, respectively. Twenty-four patients (18.0%) were in Status 1 at the transplant. The mean ischaemic time was 187.9 ± 52.6 min. Intraoperative BVF was observed in 18 cases (13.5%). Patients with BVF, and their respective donors, were older than the other patients (patients: 53.3 vs 47.4 years, P = 0.06; donors: 49.4 vs 42.9 years, P 0.06), and experienced significantly higher in-hospital mortality (47.3 vs 7.8%, P = 0.0001). The combination of patients aged 60 years or older with donors aged 60 years or older carried a mortality of 66.6% (6 out of 9). The three groups of patients did not differ significantly in terms of preoperative and intraoperative features and outcomes, including biventricular graft failure and death. At multivariate analysis, predictors of in-hospital death were a combination of both a recipient and a donor aged ≥60 years (OR 27.9), intraoperative BVF (OR 14.8) and previous cardiac surgery (OR 13.0). Cardioplegic solution did not predict mortality.
CONCLUSIONS
We did not observe a significant effect of the kind of cardioplegic solution on the early HT outcomes. The combination between both a recipient and a donor aged ≥60 years, reoperation and BVF are strong predictors of in-hospital death.
The LHCb experiment at CERN has decided to optimise its physics reach by removing the first level hardware trigger for 2020 and beyond. In addition to requiring fully redesigned front-end electronics ...this design creates interesting challenges for the data-acquisition and the rest of the online computing system. Such a system can only be realized within realistic cost using as much off-the-shelf hardware as possible. Relevant technologies evolve very quickly and thus the system design is architecture-centred and tries to avoid to depend too much on specific technologies. In this paper we describe the design, the motivations for various choices and the current favoured options for the implementation, and the status of the R&D. We will cover the back-end readout, which contains the only custom-made component, the event-building, the event-filter infrastructure, and storage.
The ATLAS experiment records proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC accelerator. The ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition (TDAQ) system selects interesting events on-line in a three-level ...trigger system in order to store them at a budgeted rate of several hundred Hz. This paper focuses on the TDAQ data-logging system and in particular on the implementation and performance of a novel parallel software design. The main challenge presented by a parallel data-logging implementation is the conflict between the largely parallel nature of the event processing, especially the recently introduced event compression, and the constraint of sequential file writing and hash-sum evaluation. This is further complicated by the necessity of operating in a fully data-driven mode, to cope with continuously evolving trigger and detector configurations. In this paper we report on the design of the new ATLAS on-line storage software. In particular we will discuss our development experience using recent concurrency-oriented libraries. Finally we will show the new system performance with respect to the old, single-threaded software design.
Yondelis™ (trabectidin, ET-743) is a marine natural product that has shown activity both in preclinical systems and in human malignancies such as soft tissue sarcoma and ovarian cancers that are ...resistant to previous chemotherapies. Molecular pharmacological studies indicated that Yondelis interacts with DNA and DNA repair systems in a way that is different from Cisplatin (DDP). The current study was designed to investigate the effects of the combination of Yondelis and DDP in human cancer cell lines and in xenografts derived from different tumours. The in vitro studies performed in human TE-671 rhabdomyosarcoma, Igrov-1 and 1A9 human ovarian carcinoma cell lines showed additive effects or slight synergism. Several human tumour xenografts, such as TE-671 rhabdomyosarcoma, SK-N-DX neuroblastoma, FADU head and neck, LX-1 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), H-187 melanoma and SKOV HOC 8 ovarian carcinoma, showed an antitumour effect for the combination that was greater than that of each drug when given as a single agent. No consistent changes in the activity were observed if Yondelis and DDP were given 1 h apart in sequence or simultaneously. An orthotopically transplanted human ovarian cancer HOC 8 growing in the peritoneal cavity of nude mice was used that is insensitive to Yondelis alone and only moderately sensitive to DDP alone. The combination of the two drugs produced a dramatic increase of survival lasting several months. In conclusion, the combination of Yondelis and DDP is synergistic in vivo (i.e. the antitumour effect is greater than that of each drug used as a single agent at the maximum tolerated dose (MTD)) in different human tumour xenografts. The two drugs can be combined at the MTD of each drug, thus indicating there are no overlapping toxicities. These results provide a rationale for testing the combination of Yondelis and DDP in the clinic.
Abstract Objecive Cardiac allograft vasculopathy represents an accelerated form of obstructive coronary disease. It is the main cause of late death following heart transplantation. Percutaneous ...coronary intervention is considered a palliative procedure due to high restenosis rates. The aim of this study was to review our experience with percutaneous coronary interventions using stents in cardiac transplant recipients. Methods The present analysis included all primary adult heart transplanted patients who had been discharged from the hospital after transplantation, had a clinical follow-up of 12 months and underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Results Seventy heart transplanted patients underwent percutaneous revascularization. Our analysis comprised 85 first-vessel procedures resulting in treatment of 135 lesions. The mean time from heart transplantation to first intervention was 9.3 ± 4.8 years. Primary success was obtained in 96% lesions; at least 1 recurrent stenosis event occurred in 16 patients with primarily successful PCI. Lesions treated with drug-eluting stents experienced recurrent stenosis in 16% of cases. During a mean follow-up after PCI of 45.2 ± 41.7 months, 27 deaths (19 cardiac) and 1 late re-transplantation occurred after PCI. Conclusion In cardiac transplant recipients, percutaneous coronary intervention with stents can be performed safely with high rates of primary success. Restenosis rates were higher compared with coronary interventions in native coronary arteries. Drug-eluting stents seemed to favorably impact restenosis compared with bare-metal stents. The clinical benefit from percutaneous coronary intervention may be reduced due to disease progression in untreated coronary segments.
PDF
